Darwin's cockroach-in-ear man finds fame

A Darwin man who tried to vacuum a large cockroach out of his ear, and eventually had medical staff drown it in olive oil before extracting it, has become a minor international celebrity.

The story about Hendrik Helmer broke on local ABC radio in Darwin last week, and has since garnered media interest from countries including India, Russia, Britain and France.

"I wasn't expecting it to go sort of that big, but then, once I realised how many people are freaked out about insects going inside their ears, then it sort of sank in," Mr Hendrik said.

"Lots of people have that insect-in-the-ear phobia, or at least some sort of cringe-worthiness about having a bug crawling into their ear so I can see how it has generated such great interest."

Mr Helmer last week described how he was awoken in the early hours of Wednesday morning with excruciating pain, after a 2cm cockroach crawled into his right ear.

He said the pain was overwhelming and despite a few bouts of relief, began to get worse.

He feared some kind of insect had crawled inside, and tried to remove it by using a vacuum cleaner to suck it out as well as squirting water down his ear.

Apparently, it angered the insect.

"Whatever was in my ear didn't like it at all," he said.

Mr Helmer went to Royal Darwin Hospital, where the insect was drowned in olive oil and extracted from his ear canal with forceps in what staff said was the largest cockroach they had ever taken out of an ear.

Within hours the story of Mr Hendrik had been picked up by websites around the world.

A Google News search of Mr Helmer's name and "cockroach" today returned more than 3000 results from 109 different news sources including The Voice of Russia, Oneindia, the Irish Examiner, TopNews in the Arab Emirates and the Agence France-Presse.

The BBC in the UK has asked him for a radio interview.

"Other than that, most of the messages have been through people on Facebook and they come from all over the world," Mr Hendrik said.

Mr Hendrik thanked the ABC for letting the world know about the story, but said some news stories had made him laugh because the story was being exaggerated.

"I have chuckled, we have all had a good joke, because some of them said I was hospitalised because of it, well, no, that is not the case. I went to the hospital to get it removed," Mr Hendrik said.

"They used stock images of any cockroach that they could find, so of course some of them have got pictures of big, big, big, big house cockroaches and stuff like that."

Mr Hendrik, who works as a supervisor at a warehouse, said he had not been offered any book or film deals in the wake of his moment in the spotlight.

"We would need to seriously mess with the facts of the story to make it more interesting for the big screen I think," he said.